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Love, or something that sits warm. Casting chromatic shadows. Cools to harden, to still. Dark room. Fire higher to melt. Breath to stoke. Quiet crackle. Solid becomes liquid. Molten plastic gelatinous Love. You can not discern its edges. Love in this state is burning hot. Love in this state is reflective. Flickering between multiplicity and duality. Two becomes three becomes a kaleidoscope of microscopic Loves until it’s just one big Love. After all, it really was all along. One big Love isn’t heavy. Love permeates the cell wall through osmosis. Love has no constant density. Love, the idea… It’s a lot of little small Loves weaving their fibres together to make a gleaming, glistening net or web in that liquid state. And there are these tense spots where your feet weigh on the net and in pressing a bit harder, you can see these Loves. You might see a few small ones in the fridge at times, or burning out in ashtrays. Cooling to solid in lost-and-found’s or hanging over fences. Like last night's snow laying on the ground. Sometimes the Love will be clean and fresh. Contained. Other times, the Love is messy, dripping down your chin or spilling out of your pockets. Some Loves may be afraid to step out. They linger quietly like untethered shadows caught in the second dimension. Try feeding them in a safe space. Feed them bright colors and frangible ideas and feed them quiet and still places where (not a word needs uttering to explain). Love, the memory. Or Love, the present and future which became indiscernible from each other. Or Love distinctly atemporal. Love which is finite. Love on conditions. These Loves are the thread of myth and mundanity. They can sometimes be spotted in the sky near dusk. You may look up and spot a great billowing textile filling the sky. One big Love comprised of innumerably smaller Loves unraveling and unraveling and unraveling. Trailing behind itself in the wind. Subjective Love. Romanticized Love. Love as a synonym for ‘unexplainable’. Love to create. Love to destroy. Love which remains intact after complete deconstruction. Dissection as a matter of detangling. Love as the fibre which held the body intact. Love as the heat lingering in the sheets when sleepers wake. Love as the held breath. Love the peripheral sensation. The Queer element. Love incalculable. Electromagnetic Love in the fifth dimension. Love shifting, enlacing. A word from the author: It's quite fun to try and quantify intangible things or identify the seams and structures of the organic. I am a transgender multimedia artist, a story-teller, a believer in magic, and a baby of the sea.

Angie has a small part in my unpublished novel. Her daughter, Mindy, is the catalyst in the novel and the second protagonist as it were. Mindy is a college student and part-time stripper. She meets Jordan, the protagonist and college professor, walking home from the club at 2 am in a short skirt. Jordan and Mindy start a friendship but Angie has reservations about Jordan. Both newly vaccinated, Angie and I had lunch in person last week and I was able to ask her questions I’d been pondering for some time. She was resplendent in a lime-colored blouse, sky blue skirt, silver hoop earrings, and a turquoise necklace. I dressed in my drab usual: Old Navy button-down shirt and khakis. What’s your earliest memory? Shit, I don’t know. I didn’t have a great childhood so I’ve blocked most of them. I remember going to church in a very itchy dress and my mother telling me to stop scratching and listen to the preacher. I couldn’t have been more than four or five. What was the last thing that made you laugh? My husband, Jack – he’s a sweet man – but a bit too capable, you know the type, overbearing. He backed into a fire hydrant last week and put a nice dent into his new Camry. I peed my pants. Literal description. What’s your guilty pleasure? I like to eat Oreos in bed and fall asleep without brushing my teeth. What’s your greatest shame or secret? Like I said, my childhood sucked and I never wanted any child of mine to have the same. I can’t say for sure that Mindy’s was all that much better. That kills me. What do you think happens when we die? Geez, this is getting philosophical. You’re the college professor, remember? I’m an office manager. You rot in the ground and become earthworm food. Or whatever. Look, I know I could die tomorrow, but I’m only 46, why are you bringing up death? I could take Mindy to the pyramids or the Great Wall. I could be a grandma or own my own business. I got unfinished business here. Forget about what comes after. Is your marriage to Jack a mistake? Fuck you. How do you feel about being a minor character in a novel which will likely never be published? How do you feel about being its author? Ouch. Your daughter earns money thrusting herself at old men. How do you feel about that? You may be a writer, but, if you think that defines Mindy, you’re a bad reader. Humans are complex. Did you forget the ending of the novel? And, seriously, what’s with all these questions? I’m your character, remember. Fair enough, I’ll wrap up. Do you think you’ll appear in another novel? Definitely not, but a short story isn’t out of the question. You’re more of a short story writer. How would your short story go? Damned if I know. Probably some political angle: gentrification of the neighborhood, homeless guy living on my porch, working-class woman makes good. You know, that type of thing. I think you write in lieu of real activism. You sound bitter. Probably just horny. Jack doesn’t do it in that department. Ah. Can I ask you a question? Sure. In the novel, your novel, I have lunch with Jordan. Of course, it’s from his point of view and the readers learn that he feels desire for me. Now, I’m sitting across from you and I see the same thing in your eyes. Are you lusting after your own character? Um, that’s awkward. It sure is. Maybe we should go. Split the check? Fuck no. It’s on you.

My grandmother never said the words I love you, speaking instead in Blackjack for taffy on the flowered davenport in a living room free from pictures of my grandpa green Tupperware Oreos in the icebox, extra blankets in the clothes press sleepovers on school nights, the perfectly toasted waffle and knowing what she must about dreams the way she looked outside, beyond her window, saying only oh David, Grandma won’t be around to see that.

she said women aren’t allowed to need but we aren’t supposed to be strong either so we develop self-destructive rituals men call emotional problems the only problem i developed was from needing too much and packing in a buzz to blur my disappointment i touch my female lovers all the time when i hold their sobbing bodies and dry their tears shed because they’re disappointed from needing some man too much i hold her hand because i need to hold someone who understands me i think it might be impossible to shut off one emotion without shutting them all off it is too much to expect to be able to give without expecting anything in return maybe we aren’t allowed to need but Beth Mulcahy (she/her), a Gen X-er from Michigan, lives in Ohio with her husband, two kids and loyal Havanese dog sidekick. Beth works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. She writes poetry, fiction, memoir, and dreams about visiting Scotland. Her work has appeared in various journals and she has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Check out her latest publications at https://linktr.ee/mulcahea

CW: Childhood sexual abuse, death Chasie wasn’t the only game you took fancy to, hidden away from grownups who partied in the dining room where my school bag laid near the breakfast bar. My childhood devoured by a monster with hands three times my size. Memories of your beanstalk figure breathing down my neck— my growing buds, your prey. You rejected my plea to stop and my mother’s fiery bellows to quit smothering my lungs but no didn’t feature in your vocabulary. I became a doll, lifeless in your arms. Juvenile adults still believed you were child friendly and the red flags didn’t bleed enough for anyone to lock you out of my house. I Googled your real name, searched for a jail term, a life sentence, for reams of young girls you lifted onto monkey bars, to leer at the skirts that fell past their barbie studded ears. Instead, the results showed your face that compared my pre-teen breasts to pincushions with a link to your live-streamed funeral. I took a pen and paper from the drawer in my desk that once sat a pink rock you told me to keep a secret. I began to write: Passed away painfully, suffering at the mercy of a miserable disease that began in the penis and ended in the lonely heart… Bianca Grace is a poet living in Australia. She is a reader for Sledgehammer Lit and Full House Lit. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Selcouth Station, Capsule Stories, The Daily Drunk Mag, Postscript Magazine and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @Biancagrace031

1. I think often about Beethoven, the 1992 children's movie; a John Hughes creation about a clumsy yet lovable St. Bernard. I remember sitting in the theatre at eight years old, attending a classmate's ninth birthday party, surrounded by my friends as they whispered and hissed and asked loudly if this movie was rated R (it wasn't). 2. A baby Beethoven invading a white home with white furniture and mauve carpet, so named because he barks stupidly whenever Emily, the youngest, taps out the opening strains of Fur Elise on the upright piano in the corner of the living room. He has terrorized the house with muddy footprints. stolen roast chicken legs. and has a tendency to disappear into pastel comforters. 3. The dog grows into a big and slobbery mess. He drools so much that he drools directly into the father's shoe, who drains the shoe with a yowl that reveals perfectly straight teeth. Beethoven's fur seems always to be damp, and I can smell the German shepherd who bit me in the stomach last fall, no blood but a bite of pain that lasted the rest of the day, a whole sunny Saturday gauzy with agony. 4. I was still dreaming about the German Shepherd, its snapped leash, its brown shoe-button eyes, by that spring. The theatre in April, the alien cold of air conditioning and the sun just beyond the red fire exit in the bottom corner of the screen. 5. Beethoven has made a chaos of the home, a home that looks like a dollhouse, a home where rainwater rushes down the front of the porch even though the sun is clearly shining in the background. I wonder about how movies are made, how the director directs it to rain. 6. I wonder harder when the father, lying in the giant bed in the dark, mistakes Beethoven's licks to his ear for the licks of his wife. "Oh Baby, it's not even Saturday night!" he says to a clueless Beethoven. "You drive me crazy. Has daddy's little girl been naughty?" "George!" his wife yells from the bathroom. My wondering kicks into overdrive. I will never really stop wondering about this scene. 7. Beethoven knocks more tables over. Beethoven saves Emily when she nearly drowns in the family's swimming pool. Of course a movie with a large, slobbery dog would include a drowning girl in need of a rescue. 8. The "of course" reverberates in my stomach--I nearly say it out loud in the theatre but don't. The "of course" ripples through me again when Beethoven's newly acquired army of dog friends ramble through the supermarket and knock over a perfectly placed pyramid of perfectly round cabbages. 9. "Of course," my heart whispers. Of course. The "of course" sounds as inevitable and resigned as my father after a 12-hour shift at the Goodyear plant. 10. Surely no other child can possibly believe this movie is funny or good or even acceptable. Surely every other child has realized we have been seated in this freezing theatre as some sort of colossal joke on the part of birthday boy Travis Kleinschmidt's mother. Travis Kleinschmidt's brother John is known for his jokes. My mother calls him a "class clown" and likes to use the phrase "boys will be boys" when referring to the Kleinschmidt brothers. 11. But I am wrong. There is no joke at this 1992 birthday screening of Beethoven. The movie is real, and a slow, clattering realization in the back of my brain makes me think this movie might not only be real but bad. Really bad. Alarmingly bad. 12. The kids are in a state of rapture around me. They whisper with glee whenever Beethoven shakes mud onto anything. The father screams, the kids laugh. There is a fart joke. The drool never ends and neither does the near-constant hiss of "groooooossss" through the theatre, followed by a cyclone of giggles. Beethoven topples another table. 13. Travis Kleinschmidt, wearing a Burger King crown and seated behind me, flanked by his two best friends Chase and Kyle, will not stop kicking the back of my seat. Beethoven merely has to glance at another cheap set with his big, world-weary eyes, and Travis is thrashing like a fish, the vinyl seat thudding and groaning at the impact of his Air Jordans. I turn to look at him but don't yell at him--he's the birthday boy, after all. My mother has taught me to be kind to those gracious enough to invite you to their birthday parties. 14. The villains in Beethoven consist of loud men in fancy suits hired by an evil veterinarian to kidnap Beethoven. Beethoven's army of dog friends chases them through an alley at one point, and the men slam a chain-link gate behind them. Believing their plan to be genius, the villains shake their asses and stick out their tongues at the dog army, chanting in singsong: "Stupid stupid doggy! Stupid stupid doggy!" 15. I've seen Travis Kleinschmidt do similar things at recess--the chants, the Bart Simpson-style butt shaking, the faces and tongues through the dome of the jungle gym. Would Travis Kleinschmidt grow up to be these men? Would I continue to encounter the taunts of men in expensive suits until I died? Would I have to attend their birthday parties, also until I died? 16. I had a flash of myself as a grown woman, doing an adult thing like strolling in a city park wearing a plaid scarf, and dogs, St. Bernards like Beethoven, German Shepherds like the dog who bit me, and every other type of dog, jumping on me, licking me, slobbering in happiness as my stomach tightened. The owner would approach me. "Oh, but he's friendly. He won't hurt you." "Of course," I would say. "Of course." 17. Of course Beethoven saves the day and of course the evil veterinarian pays. 18. Travis Kleinschmidt's mother asks us, as the lights slowly rise, if we liked the movie. The kids roar yes around me. I might have said yes as well, simply because they did. Or I might have looked at the floor, now flecked with popcorn and sticky with pop. I remember being worried for the future, maybe even a tiny bit afraid. 19. In 1992 Beethoven was the first in what would become an eight-movie franchise (two theatrical releases and six direct-to-video) that ended with Beethoven’s Treasure Trail in 2014, the year I would complete graduate school. 20. "Did you like the movie?" my mom asks in the parking lot as I open the door to our Mazda minivan that smells vaguely of baby wipes and leaking pouches of Capri Sun. The April around us is about to burst into summer. "Of course," I say, trying the phrase out for the first time. It's awkward and tastes almost bitter on my tongue ("groooooossss" " my classmates might say), but I learn to live with it. I learn to live with a lot of things. Katie Berger lives in Omaha, NE, where she works as an academic advisor. Her work has appeared in Pidgeonholes, Cherry Tree, and others, and she has published two chapbooks with Dancing Girl Press.

My mother blows smoke off the cast-iron comb she’s pulled from burning coals. She grabs the handle with a small raggedy hand towel already singed brown from previous sessions, then wipes the charcoal black clean with another, before sinking its warped teeth into my roots and through kinks. I wait for the sizzle, inhaling the burning stench of wild hair getting straightened into submission. I hold my breath, scrunching my shoulders high, and brace for the heat, inching closer. My fingertips pin down the rim of my ears greased with vaseline, as she warns for the fiftieth time, “don’t move”. I moved once. There’s a mark on my right wrist from flinching too soon, sending the comb flying out of her hands. I don’t remember the aftermath, only that my hair is soft and swishes from side to side. By seven, I’m a ways from West Africa, and I have a feeling that people measure beauty differently here. I want to flip my hair like other girls on the playground do. Theirs is long and fine and I study how they brush their hands behind their swan necks and send it back over their shoulders. That’s beauty to me. My hair’s buzzed low because nobody can dare tame it like my mother, and it feels like a sun-dried sponge. When the wind blows and teases their strands of silk across their faces, it passes mine by, like the boys’ gaze. My legal guardian asks every black woman we see how to tackle this hair. All I want it to do is behave, stay matted down with the cheap gel I pile on every morning that isn’t made for it, but I apply in globs every day, then step out in the mid-west winter that’ll freeze it. My mother’s letters from across the world are full of hair advice. I don’t understand. She’s obsessed with it; I’m not. Friends dare me to fro my hair. It’s middle school and we’re all looking for ways to stand out, embrace ourselves, and fit in. Students reach out to touch it in the hallways, running their fingers through. Teachers gawk at it from their whiteboards at the front of the room, and now I have the skater boys’ attention. “Dude, that’s awesome!” Everyone means well, but I’m more of a spectacle, not someone who’s desired. Their gaze still rests on the preppy girls who say they wish they had my hair, but I don’t believe them. My confidence retracts into puffy pigtails, then braids. At least hair extensions lay on my shoulders and across my back. I despise the dark hair on my arms, so I shave it off. Boys like smooth, unblemished skin. If I can’t change the color, I can alter how it feels. I take care of the sideburns too, along with the little hairs sprouting from under my chin. Mom writes that it runs in the family. All my aunties are hairy. Comforting, but this is high school. By college, I want everyone to think my wigs are real. Summer break brings many changes, but everyone wonders about my hair’s mysterious growth except my black resident advisor. I wait for roommates to go home on the weekends, then hang it on the bedpost to let my head breathe, cornrows exposed. When I meet my future husband four years later, I tell him the truth. “Whatever makes you feel free”, he says. That was beauty for him. I ask myself what those letters riddled with hair care meant. I think my mother knew how it began. If it didn’t start with the color of my skin, it would start with my hair. It’s all connected. The need to disappear and become someone else, shunning every option to love myself. I sit in my salon chair. I’ve settled on a new hair-do that’s shaved on my right side around the back, and full of my natural hair on the left, two extremes, my personal tug of war. My mother dislikes that it shows the scalp rolls at the base of my head. I did for some brief time, too. She combs through my wet and relaxed hair, then inquires before styling like she’s known my track record all these years, “Do you want it curled up or blow-dried white girl straight?” Wendy Newbury is a music teacher and writer living in Pasco, WA. She is currently writing a memoir. Her single work has been published in The New York Times Tiny Love Stories column.

Never wake your sleeping hero because he’s probably dream-drooling over the hottie he’s with in Gala, coconut oiling her bum cheeks, and judging by his twitches it’s the explicit bit, which makes you want to hammer the glass window because it’s not your arse. But there’s a £1000 fine for misuse and that’s money better spent on getting out of this hellhole. Now what would it feel like to sit next to him, inhale his Yves Saint Laurent, twist your head a touch closer and sense the tailwind of his breath on your cheek? Would your mam loathe you or love you for this? Would she listen when you tell her he’s more chiseled than on the album covers, that his eyelashes are bloody dashing, that there’s dandruff on his collar or maybe it’s eczema due to the strain of being on tour, signing autographs, plucking his Gibson Les Paul? And so you splay your fingers gently on his, nestle against his shoulder, pretend to drift off to the clickety-clacks. Were he to wake up from the click of your selfies, what would you utter, what question would you ask to stand out from the others who say so, where do you get your inspiration from? And when he says what the! you find his voice is nothing like his singing voice and he has enclaves of eye goop. Kik Lodge writes flash in France. Her work has featured in The Moth, Tiny Molecules, The Cabinet of Heed, Reflex Fiction, Sledgehammer Lit, Ellipsis Zine, Splonk, Bending Genres and Litro.

No, you didn’t wake me. Nobody here got any sleep last night. There’s a woman down the hall who spent most of the night screaming. She thinks she has hepatitis or something. You look dubious. Well, she’s obviously in some kind of pain, whether it’s in her liver or in her head. There. You hear her? Can’t you give her Fentanyl or something? You’ll make her happy, and you’ll give the rest of us some peace. It’s a win-win. Unethical? Isn’t it your job to alleviate suffering? We’re all suffering here. Yes, I’m in pain, too. No, I can’t rate it on a one-to-ten scale. I feel as though my head is caught in a trash compactor. They told me I have a mild concussion. I probably have a hangover, too. Also, I can’t breathe. Is my nose broken? Are my teeth all there? I did learn something last night: an airbag packs quite a punch. Rate my mood on a one-to-ten scale? That’s funny. A scream, you might say. No, I don’t feel suicidal, though if that screaming persists, I may before too long. To the extent that I can remember anything from last night, I don't think I felt suicidal then either. Admittedly, my actions may suggest otherwise. So, I take it from the tenor of your questions that I’m on a psych ward. How long can I expect to stay here? That’s pretty vague. I’d like to leave today. I didn’t think you would recommend it, but I can, right? Against medical advice? So be it. That screaming has me at the end of my rope. No, I don’t know how much I drank yesterday. A lot, I suppose. More than usual, even for me. I have been drinking quite a lot lately. Yes, there’s a family history. My father was a drunk. Probably drank himself to death. He died of liver cancer. He left when I was eight. I saw him sporadically after that. According to my mother, he paid his child support sporadically, too. No, not violent, but he was mean. My abiding memory of him is of the time he popped up at the door one Saturday in January when I was twelve—I hadn’t seen him by then for more than two years—saying he wanted to spend some time with his son. He took me back to the furnished room he was living in at the time—I was surprised Mom let me go with him—gave me my first beer, which I didn’t much care for, and told me in graphic detail about the seventy-nine other women he’d slept with before, during and after the marriage. He seemed pleased with himself. Maybe he hoped that I would take after him. In that respect, I didn’t. I never cheated on Peg. It was she who…But I don’t want to talk about that. When I talked about drinking a lot lately—well, maybe lately is a stretch. More like the last year or so. Since…Since I found out that Peg was sleeping with a colleague of hers, another House Ways and Means Committee staffer. Apparently, they began showing each other their ways and means while working together to craft a capital gains tax loophole—a piece of legislation rather disingenuously titled the Family First Support Act, or the FFS Act. I kid you not. Having met the bill’s primary sponsor once at a holiday party, I can say with confidence that he’s a moron and that it never would have occurred to him that the acronym might have a double meaning. Peg didn’t appreciate my joking about it. By that time, she had convinced herself that she was doing good. People can will themselves to believe anything, given the right set of incentives. A funny thing: the night Peg told me about the affair, she cried and cried, and begged me to forgive her. We even had sex—the kind we used to in the early days, when we could spend a whole weekend in bed. What I had found so striking about her then was her uncanny resemblance to the 1940s film star Veronica Lake—the same evanescent beauty, the same yellow hair curling over her right cheekbone, the same hint of sadness in her eyes. That night, I again thought myself a very fortunate man to be sharing a bed with her. Afterwards, when we lay spent, with her head resting on my arm and her left leg curling over mine, I kissed her forehead and whispered, “Where did we lose each other?” But there would be no reprise, and in retrospect, I would have done better to move out that very night. Instead, I stayed and drank, while unbeknownst to me, she continued the affair for some months more. Ultimately, her lover ended it. Family values and all that. Unlike her, he was not willing to destroy his. What do I think went wrong? With me? With Peg? With us? I don’t know. I don’t know whether we changed—whether people ever really do—or just revealed more and more of ourselves until we both became so hideous in each other’s sight that we had to turn away. Dueling pictures of Dorian Gray. We’d always had our differences—over religion, politics, and after the boys were born, childrearing. For a long time, though, until Mr. Ways and Means came along, we managed to compartmentalize our disagreements. Or I did. If she were here, she would probably tell you that for her the marriage died long before, that my thoughtless ways and relative lack of means drove her to seek comfort elsewhere. My God! That screaming! Not that I blame the poor woman. I have no doubt that the pain is real, whether it originates in her liver, as she seems to think, or in her head, as you apparently do. Either way, she’s in hell. What? No, I don’t believe in a literal hell. Peg does. She thinks I’m headed there—or hopes I am. She has said to me a thousand times, “May God forgive you,” meaning, of course, just the opposite. Do you suppose that hell is something that passes down from one generation to the next? I worry about the younger boy, Aaron. He’s a brooder, too much like me. He just turned eight. Same age as…Ah. Isn’t it strange how, despite your best intentions, you find yourself emulating someone you despise and recreating in your own life the misery visited upon you? I sometimes think that dogs have greater self-knowledge than we do. Their needs are simple and their actions, straightforward. They want something, and they go after it. We, on the other hand…But I should only speak for myself. Yes, I presume that some people can break such patterns. But me? I don’t know. I don’t see how I could ever face the boys again after yesterday. No, I’m not. It’s just something in my eye. Yesterday is all a blur, to tell you the truth. I was lying on the living room sofa, passed out drunk, and then a noise that sounded like a gunshot woke me up. It was a bottle crashing against the wall. The very bottle I’d been drinking from. The front door was wide open, and Peg and the boys were standing just inside. She was screaming, the boys were crying, and outside, the woman from next door was slinking down the path toward the sidewalk. I was shivering from the cold, and covered with glass shards. As best I can piece things together, the boys must have gotten tired of waiting for me to come get them from school—I work at home, so I usually drop them off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon—and decided to walk. The school is over a mile from home, and the temperature was in the twenties at the time. They must have stood outside for a long time, ringing the bell, banging on the door, yelling, crying, and God-knows-what, but I was too far gone to hear them. The neighbor must have taken them in until Peg got home. I do not blame Peg for aiming a bottle at my head, only for missing. Do you have kids? I ask because, whether you’re aware of it or not, you let the mask slip for a second. The look you gave me—the incomprehension and disgust in your eyes—was that of a horrified parent, not a clinician. No, I’m not mistaken. When Peg told me to get out, I didn’t even bother to pack. I just drove and drove, halfway around the Beltway, into Northern Virginia. When I felt myself sobering up, I got off the Beltway and stopped at some dive bar for another drink or three or six. By the time I got back in my car, the snow had begun. The rest I remember in fragments, like one of those nightmares in which you never get to the one place you absolutely have to be. Seeing the sign for the Beltway but missing the entrance ramp. Turning around and driving past it again. Another U-turn, and then, the tree. Did I hit it intentionally? No. I can tell that you don’t believe me, but it’s the truth. Had I hit it directly at full speed, I wouldn’t be here. I skidded into it. Now, if I had given the matter any thought, it may have occurred to me that driving at high speed while blind drunk during a raging snowstorm would inevitably result in my hitting a tree or another car or a person. But I didn’t give the matter any thought. I did not want to think at all, just to stay in motion, to drive as fast as I could for as long as I could. Why? Because if I stopped, my thoughts would catch up with me. What thoughts? The kind that tear at your innards like that eagle forever gnawing on Prometheus’s liver. Like the poor woman down the hall, who can’t tell where her pain is coming from because it’s radiating through every cell of her body and every thought. Clinically speaking, would you say she’s lost her mind? Would you say I’ve lost mine? People talk so casually about losing their minds, but they have no idea. No idea. God! Couldn’t you do something for her? Please? All she wants is some peace. She’s suffering so. Can’t you hear? Edward Belfar is the author of a collection of short stories called Wanderers, which was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2012. His fiction and essays have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including Shenandoah, The Baltimore Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Potpourri, Confrontation, Natural Bridge, and Tampa Review. He lives in Maryland with his wife and works as a writer and editor.

Forever relegated to the role of the elder and more responsible child, I delivered almost every sibling disaster headline to my mother. My younger brother Mick fucked up again, managed to get arrested for possession and distribution, and found himself sitting in a jail cell for the first time. “It’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, Mel!” my mother shouted when I broke the news. However, the camel is my mother, and my mother’s back is strong. My mother called me back for the fourth time in under two hours, quizzing me, “Is there anything else, Mel? Are you sure that’s all there is to it?” So, I carefully reviewed with her the details of our previous three phone calls. My mother said she didn’t want to forget the little things; she feared, or hoped, she might have heard me wrong the first time. But she didn’t hear me wrong; rather, her ears resisted the weight of my message. My mother helped her children whenever she could, always offering us encouragement and support. But, unlike the baby camel who walks on its own immediately after birth, my brother could never move forward on his own. And so, my mother carried my little brother Mick on her back for almost fourteen years. But my mother is a camel, and she can carry almost nine hundred pounds. For my part, I developed into a (mostly) strong and independent adult. And so, my mother, believing she did an adequate job with me, continued focusing her attention on Mick. But, no matter how hard my mother wished or prayed, Mick struggled to find his footing. So, inevitably, my mother will set out to save Mick’s ass once again. I sat by the phone and awaited my mother’s fifth call of the day. She will want me to check her accounts, ensuring she has enough money for a lawyer or possible bail for Mick. I will try and make my mother understand the severity of what has happened, but she is already on a mission to save my brother. She will ignore the impossibility of his situation, unable or unwilling to hear or see the barriers that impede her way forward. You see, my mother is a camel, and she will travel one hundred miles through a desert to save her son. I wanted to tell my mother I am angry with her for always rescuing Mick. And, I resented the fact that my brother kept taking, giving our mother nothing back in return but grief. I wanted my mother to leave my brother in his cell and teach him a lesson. I needed her to understand she was partly to blame for my brother’s inability to stand on his own. But, of course, I won’t say this to my mother; she wouldn’t listen even if I did. So, I finally picked up the ringing phone and said, “Hello, Mom.” “Why haven’t you answered, Mel? I have been trying to reach you. And you know we have so much to do!” my mother began. And then, instead of convincing her to let my brother figure it out himself, I listened, wrote down her instructions, and started the process of saving Mick. And all the while, I remembered, my mother is a two-humped camel, and she still has one hump left for me.

Charlie Chaplin and Me When I was a kid, I thought we were related. I walked like him and, like him, didn’t speak, and could pantomime like a vagabond tramp. Ballroom dancing was easy as I skated my way around flip-flops with orders of restaurant meals. I was always roaming around my neighborhood, looking in windows as if I didn’t belong anywhere. Every one of his silent films was too good to miss, and I fell madly in love with Claire Bloom in Limelight. When he ridiculed Hitler, I laughed until I cried, and applauded until I wore the skin off of my hands. I envied him for having the courage of his convictions, to retire to a country with no army. Courage You never know how much you have until you’re tested. I had no fear when I slept overnight In the woods to prove I was as brave as a Leni Lenape Indian at the age of 14 to qualify as an honorary member of the Order of the Arrow. I had no fear when I took a bus to Afton, New York to work as a Farm Cadet during the second world war. I was not afraid to drive my ’37 Dodge to Iowa City in a January blizzard of 1950 to enroll as a student at the University of Iowa. I had no fear the day I became a member of the US Army during the Korean War. Now I’m being tested again as I face life alone after losing my loving wife of 67 years. How brave will I be? I will be the first to find out. The Love of My Life Anyone can tell you she presented herself as a sparkling bright light with an alluring charisma, and more alive than any human being I ever knew. Her lifelong guiding idea was to live with no chance of the casual. Vibrating with life, she never wanted to miss a trick, yet managed to live by the five Buddhist precepts even though her dreams were often filled with dancing dreidels, mezuzahs and menorahs. Her presence changed the quality of the air, made the sun hotter, and the moon whiter than it has ever been. My Mutinous First Mate Jumped overboard before me, leaving me to cry the 3 rivers dry from the tidal estuaries of— Brudenell, Cardigan and Montague, rivers that flowed into Saint Mary’s Bay. I spent the happiest days of my life with my chest puffed up like Captain Bly, getting my Boston Whaler underway across the bay to Boughton Island. She stood at the bow, her hair flowing in the wind, moments before she exclaimed to me: I will wait for you,” and dove into the sea. Milton P. Ehrlich Ph.D. is a 90-year-old psychologist and a veteran of the Korean War. He has published many poems in periodicals such as the London Grip, Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant Literary Magazine, Wisconsin Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times.

CW: For readers of this story--This is a story about the early 1990's. It is about a rough time and place where strong and objectionable language often prevailed. In the middle "panel," I am spoken of as suffering from "pasty-faced fear," i.e. being "too white," due to my previous inexperience at the time with Latinos who were poor and not schoolfellows. The point of the final sentence of this passage, a Biblical reference to "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," is that in such an area, I was being harassed because the men on the street thought that, being out so late, I was a prostitute, and the young man was different from his comrades and was too modest to think that he himself was "without sin." In the last "panel," "Ryan's" family was in a sense marketing him because they mistakenly thought I could take care of him, and thus they in a sense made a sex worker of him to me, or me to him, though I didn't catch on right away. Coming from another area where strong language has often prevailed (where, for example, developmentally disabled people are still sometimes referred to as "retarded," and people with emotional disabilities "not right") it was possible for me to see even then that this made me and "Ryan" roughly equivalent in the prejudice we suffered from, though it was necessary as a stronger person for me to stop things. Referring to the institution as the "loony bin" marks me not as a person uninvolved with it here, but as I am myself a former occasional inmate of such places, I'm letting you know that people such as myself get tired of them, and object to the prejudice that goes on even within them where one is supposed to be safe and that often inmates themselves use such terms to define their experiences with the behavioral health system. I think anyone who knows me well will be able to say for me that I rarely use objectionable language except to make a point, but this is not a story for prissy language or the faint-hearted. That being said, I hope you enjoyed watching the gradual enlightenment about wider and other lives that my main character (myself) underwent in another kind of education. I want the main experience for the reader to be becoming aware of how far we have come, and where our dangers still lie (because we are now facing the same sorts of issues again nationally). It's time to stand up and be counted. Syracuse-Prequel Funny how you focus on things other than what’s really at issue sometimes. It was the third heavy snow of the season, and I was trying to think of expressions for the cold. They always said, “As cold as a witch’s tits in January.” Though if you don’t like witches, I’d guess they’re too cold for you at any time. Or maybe even colder in the end of October, near Halloween, or at a witches’ sabbath. Those who had less shame about showing no regard for honest labor said “As cold as a welldigger’s ass.” Tits and ass: typical Americanisms. However you wanted to phrase it, I’d lived in the Snow Belt before and it was cold. But somehow, the last time it’d been in Ithaca, going to school in a place where I was supposedly one of an elite, however little I behaved like it. People judge you later for things you can’t help either way, I guess, people on one side of the American divide or the other. And how to explain that I had lived on both sides, more or less? People don’t want to hear long-winded explanations, it sounds too much like making excuses. So, anyway, here I sat— on a fold-out couch with bad springs in a Welfare apartment. No heat, no refrigeration for my perishable food, and my little cat huddling under the couch hiding, wondering why the hell we had left Buffalo, where the apartment was heated and she had been comfortable. That I hadn’t been comfortable with a sleazy landlord who was trying to jump my bones was something that I couldn’t explain to her, nor why he was, since my mother was paying full rent for me to live there and try to write. “You’re a writer, eh? Well, just don’t bring any colorful characters into my apartment, okay?” Colorful characters? What had he meant by that? He and the other tenants were a real slice-of-life crew, not polite or particularly honest, and the first lot like them I’d met up with in my mostly-protected life. What did he mean by colorful? His imagination was a filter I couldn’t conceive of. So, it was after that I left, after the tenant who had a copy of my keys against my will, had stolen a third book from me (I was sure it was she). The landlord had come in some time and cut off the gas to the stove, apparently to produce some effect in me, I wasn’t sure what. He’d then turned up at the back door one night all the way from Depew, the suburb where he lived forty-five minutes away—well, I mean, what else could he want? He had a raunchy cologne on and his hair was slicked back, and he tried to force his way in the door. I think I shut it on his foot; he went away when it was firmly pulled to, anyway. It was after that I packed what I could take, hid my cat under my thick winter coat at the chest in a warm sling, and got on the bus headed to Amish country. Surely they’d take me in, let me work on a farm somewhere, give my cat a good berth. This notion gives me a belly laugh now. I had a worse sense of humor back then. But of course, we never got there. Because the cat, too warm? having to pee? hungry? who knows? started to wail, and the driver pulled the bus over and amid a lot of laughing girls, who’d done their best to hide me out in some unavowed kind of sympathy, by pretending to wail and be responsible for the sounds themselves--he found me. And my cat. He stopped the bus in Syracuse and made us get off, regardless of what I’d paid to get to Pennsylvania. There were various events after that, in a sort of kaleidoscopic array: a long-distance friend paying for a cheap motel for a while, a stay in an institution for two weeks while the motel manager looked after my cat for the price of my piccolo, then a rush transfer to a Welfare apartment where I luckily got in just a day before the cop squad came to look for me to try to put me back in the institution. There’s no telling just how many places like that were being used back then to house people who were stable enough at the time, but had no place to go. I hadn’t phoned Mom, couldn’t rely on her dollar, she was probably still mad about being asked to go all the way up to Buffalo to put my other stuff in storage somewhere. So, there I sat. And it was cold. The window glass was cracked and thin in places, with a few ripples near the edges. Rime had gathered all around, and thick ice inside on the bottom three inches, and I was still sitting, wondering how many more days it was going to be before the appliance store that the Welfare Office had an agreement with would deliver the mini-fridge I was supposed to get. I’d just been to the grocery store two miles away; I was a strong walker then, with a backpack and extra bags, armed with food stamps and some spare change I’d saved up for cleaning and cat food, since they couldn’t be bought with the stamps. I sighed. There was no reason except foolish appetite to have bought a quart of milk and a quart of half-and-half, or even the eggs and the jar of mayonnaise, the fresh vegetables, the other odd items which now would spoil. I shivered, and got on another jacket and wrapped myself in a blanket, the last two unpacked bags still on the floor in front of me. Then, in a blinding neon of late insight and halfassedry, I realized that if I was in an undesirable deep freeze, so were my groceries. Only for them, it wouldn’t be bad, but good. I hummed as I lined up the perishables on the four windowsills in the living room and back room. I left the kitchen sill empty; it was warmer in there because of the heat from cooking and the interior position of the room kept it so. That sill I would leave for the cat to sit on. Yes, now the mayonnaise was safe. Syracuse I. It’s late at night, no, early. Still dark as a bat’s wing, though, brownish-black winging through the old clapboard houses and yards. Syracuse post-Happy Hour. Friday night, of course. Not the best (cheapest) time to call, but when did I ever think of her first, she’d say. Still possible, then, to place a collect call from the only payphone in three city blocks (back, I cast my mind back; I remember the small post the phone was mounted on, time after patient time, by a phone company’s workers who knew if they went by three weeks later, the neighborhood’s boys— can you really call them young men?— would have it torn wire from wire and leave it hanging to the ground again). And after all, then the workers could go for a quick beer at noon, when the streets were drowsy still, out of their truck and into Danny’s for lunch, company-allowed surfeit time, who would know about the beer? Who would care? Only an absent management. I stood at the phone, yes, still functioning, both of us, wakeful, waiting. I had waited only for the time when the streets would be quieter, less occupied by potential for attack; I didn’t like my neighbors, and they didn’t like me; I didn’t belong on Shonard St., a fish out of her fishbowl trying to make do with ocean. I called. I called again. Mom still asleep; I need some money, Mom, somebody stole my check from the box. Have to keep ringing, annoying the operator till Mom wakes up. Rapid escalation of heartbeat, “suddenly” is the wrong word, “instantaneous” is it: boys, no, young men coming down the street, laughter too raucous, tones too mocking, too many of them. They go past, catcalls, taunts, safely past? No, pausing at a distance, some stopping, quick whispered dialogue; I wouldn’t know now if Mom even woke up and answered, my attention too obsessed with boys, men so soon, trying to attract my fears, my fears going out to them with obliging readiness, terrified. They head back my way, picking up rocks, pebbles, still howling and caterwauling, throwing them, striking my arms, my legs, my back. I hang up the phone and slowly walk away, so as not to allow them—as if I could prevent them—to give chase. Relief. They are done with their fun with me, I hope, as they seem to keep going in the distance. No, not yet: one of them still following, my footsteps echoed by his own. Can I pick up my feet any faster, still slow, not seeming to run, but able to get away? I go faster, he pursues. Quickened by pasty-faced fear, I feel him grab? No, tap, but still, my shoulder, hear the Latino accent, this is it, I have to whirl around as if able to combat, I whirl, at least he’s not the biggest: he says, “Miss? Miss? May I walk you home?” “No, thanks.” “Okay.” At a guess, he’s not the one who threw the first stone. Syracuse II.—Resolution My second cold January in a frozen city. But I had lived through a bright, hot summer, cool and dappled with light both, as the perennially damp cold of even the top half of the small house where I was living was pleasant in the summer. And in the back room, the light from the sun poured across the stale old carpet, making a smell that would have been indefinable if I hadn’t been able to imagine all sorts of things, noxious and rotten things, that might have contributed to it. I’d been in Syracuse from a cold late fall to this January, and now my mother had had enough of my abasement at the hands of whatever one was supposed to assume the fates were these days, and she was coming to move me off Welfare and to Boston area, to be closer to my brother, who might help me reorganize my life. It was odd to ponder the words “fates” and “Welfare” as existing in the same universe; certainly they didn’t seem to find room in the same galaxy of discourse: the fates were what I used to read about in literary courses, where characters in myths, legends, novels, and poems had such things. Welfare, on the other hand, was something no one had better have any more of than anyone else, or it was unfair; and a fate was a thing too special, too prejudicial, to exist in the same conversation. Things had happened to me and others in Syracuse. Unintentionally, I’d had an affair with a developmentally disabled Latino man with the first name of Ryan (no last name given). What do I mean by unintentionally? I mean, I do have scruples, and though I didn’t abuse him in any way, I also wouldn’t have been more than a friend if I’d been clued in or been told that he was what people in my neck of the woods called “retarded,” which differentiated him from people like me, who were usually (as clients of the behavioral health system) simply called “not right.” I guess that amounted to being “wrong.” When Ryan first showed attraction, I’d not been desperately interested, but his sister and brother-in-law egged us on, and I assumed that the difficulty we were having communicating was a problem a good ESL course would have corrected (or, conversely, my learning Spanish). He was generally coherent, kind, loving, had a bright sense of humor, and was passionate and considerate at the same time. One of our neighbors, a younger man in his teens, kept pointing to me and saying to Ryan something that sounded like “Cho-cha.” I asked what it meant, and he grinned and said “Cupcake.” I still don’t know for sure what it means, but I feel it likely that it didn’t mean “cupcake.” In fact, I think it was probably, given the general behavior of the teenager, something a lot more prejudicial. Ryan and I were involved for only a little while, but I finally saw the light when his sister tried to get me to “take care of him” when they moved away. They were planning to go without him, with such an unsteady guardian as I was in charge. Just to confirm my new impression, I spoke to the mailman, who knew everything: sure enough, I had made what amounted to a serious, mistaken lapse of judgment in my own world. I was also ill, and when I told my neighbors I didn’t feel well, they called an ambulance. Somehow, though, I was put back in the loony bin for a weekend, and while I was away, someone came into my apartment, threw everything around, and stole my cat and a red cashmere sweater my mother had given me (which I never wore except when she was visiting). The sweater was unimportant, but the cat was unforgiveable. I asked around, I called outside, and one morning, I heard my baby give an answering meow. It was mid-morning, the street was mostly empty, and I kept calling and calling. Soon, it was obvious— she was in the upper level of the house next door. There was a broken window atop the house, and as I called, she poked her beloved head through the wide aperture and looked at me. I ran up to the house and climbed on the porch bannisters of the first floor, holding on with precarious grip to the roof, coaxing her down the slope of it to where I waited. Though I’ve never picked up a cat by the scruff of the neck before or since, as I cannot be persuaded it’s comfortable for them, that was the only way to carry her with one hand while I balanced with the other and got down. She submitted to this way of being handled and we went home, after Ryan had come across the street and asked what was wrong. He also delivered my Welfare check, which, even though we were no longer together, he had been protecting from a distance as it sat in my mailbox during my absence. And as the joke goes, “then some other stuff happened,” meaning in this case that Ryan and his family moved away, that one night there was a Hell’s Angels rally on the street and I was afraid to go out, that when the house next door vacated, they left their own two cats and numerous kittens there to roam the neighborhood. I took three of the kittens in, the ones that had begged admittance at the front door, meowing hungrily and winding around my legs. My mother had been coming periodically to visit all this time, and in an effort to restore me to myself, she had been bringing the New York Times crossword puzzle, which we always worked together. Without a dictionary or any form of reference, we always got it right. I don’t know how. It must’ve been one of those gratuitous dispensations, a small handout from fate. And that was all. On the day I left Syracuse, we took the refrigerator and a few other things that Welfare had paid for but refused to take back for the use of another client, and put them on a street corner, where someone else could use them. As an afterthought, I took a real gold bracelet I’d been hoarding, one which a long time before one of my college friends had given me, and hung it on the top of the pile. My final gesture of fealty and bewilderment and tribute (or guilt?) to a system that might have meant well, but didn’t serve well, so what could it have possibly done for the others who had equal right to it? And with me, I took my little family of four cats, the few possessions I’d had, and one small, injured songbird of a sparrow, who’d lived with me and the cats in his separate cage the whole time after I found him in the dust on a city street where he chirped in pain at a leg missing below the knee. Pennywhistle, who had re-learned to fly by being swung in a circle through the air on a halter of wool I’d made to fit him; who was kept in the back room away from the cats and let fly out of his cage when the door between the rooms was closed; the bright spirit who had learned the sound of the grocer’s truck coming up the street, and always whistled because, summer or winter, if I was there, I bought him cherries and fed him through the bars of the cage. Pennywhistle would be our ensign. Victoria Leigh Bennett, born W.Va., B.A., Cornell University, M.A. and Ph. D., University of Toronto. Degrees--English and Theater. Since 2012, website maintained at creative-shadows.com, mostly with reviews and articles on literary topics. August 2021, pub'd. 1st print book, "Poems from the Northeast," Olympia Publishers. 334 pp. "A LIfe," a poem from that book pub'd. in Winning Writers Sept. 15, 2021 newsletter. In addition to poetry, has written 8 novels and 1 book of short stories, currently all in search of a publisher. Twitter handle: @vicklbennett, Facebook, at Victoria Leigh Bennett. (She/her). Victoria is a member of the disabled community, dealing with the issues of manic-depression and glaucoma.